Video: Optimizing and backing up a catalog

Earlier this year, I had the privilege of heading up the Adobe headquarters and meeting with some of the Lightroom team. One of things that I discovered through that meeting is that a lot of the improvements in Lightroom 3 are things that are happening behind the scenes. It's the overall engine and some of the things that really help Lightroom operate and run quickly. So one of the things that you're going to experience is this overall improvement in regards to speed. One of the reasons why Lightroom runs faster is because the catalogs are better. We also have a few little tips here that can help us work even more efficiently with our catalogs.

In Photoshop Lightroom 3 New Features, photographer and author Chris Orwig explores the enhancements that Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3 brings to each phase of the photographic workflow—from importing and editing, to exporting and publishing. This course details Lightroom 3's new importing and asset-management features and its significant improvements in the Develop module, including enhanced sharpening and noise reduction. Chris also shows how Lightroom 3 broadens output options, and shares workflow tips and advice for upgrading Lightroom 2 catalogs and working with images processed in earlier Lightroom versions. Exercise files are included with the course.

Topics include:

Importing and managing photos and video clips

Improving efficiency with enhanced collections

Applying sharpening and noise reduction

Mastering the enhanced adjustment brush, graduated filter, and vignette features

Optimizing and backing up a catalog

Earlier this year, I had the privilege of heading up the Adobe headquarters andmeeting with some of the Lightroom team.One of things that I discovered through that meeting is that a lot of theimprovements in Lightroom 3 are things that are happening behind the scenes.It's the overall engine and some of the things that really help Lightroomoperate and run quickly.So one of the things that you're going to experience is this overallimprovement in regards to speed.One of the reasons why Lightroom runs faster is because the catalogs are better.We also have a few little tips here that can help us work even moreefficiently with our catalogs.

One of the things that you need to do quite often is back up your catalog.Your catalog contains all these different types of information about your images.So you want to save that quite often.You can modify how often you save this by going to your Lightroom pulldown menuand choosing Catalog Settings.Then I'll make sure that I have clicked on the General tab.Now what we want to do is go to the default setting, Back up catalog.By default, it's Once a week, when exiting Lightroom.This is such a welcome little improvement.Now previously, what we had to do is back up every time it would reopen Lightroom.

That was kind of a pain, because it just increased our wait time before wecould get to the images.Well, now what I do is I leave it on this Once a week option.And then when I close Lightroom, it does its thing.I don't even have to think about it.I walk away, right?Typically, how often you want to backup your catalog is how frequently youreally use Lightroom.How prolific of a shooter are you?In my own workflow, I find that Once a week works really well. All right.Well the other thing that you want to do in regards to your catalogs is navigateto your File pulldown menu and choose Optimize Catalog.

What Optimize Catalog will do is it will help your catalog run a little bit moreefficiently, especially if you've deleted a lot of images, if you've madechanges outside of Lightroom.Again, how often you do this depends on how much you're really pushingLightroom, and especially how many changes you're making to the corestructure of the files, their location, and like I mentioned deleting filesoutside of Lightroom.But one of the things that you'll notice is that when you do optimize a catalog,it basically is taking everything and just making sure everything lines up.It's just getting everything untangled and orderly.

So Lightroom is going to run much more snappy and much more efficiently.The final thing that I want to say in regards to catalogs, I'll go ahead andcancel that now, is that in the previous version of Lightroom there was areal case for working with multiple catalogs, because one of the things that wesaw was that Ligjhtroom's performance bogged down when we got a lot of imagesat super high volume.Well, what they've discovered with Lightroom 3 is that it can handle just a ton more images.So they're really isn't much of a case for having multiple catalogs.So just keep that in mind as you're working forward.

So if you ever notice that Lightroom's performance is slowing down a little bit,just be sure to head up to that File pulldown menu and then chooseOptimize Catalog.

Learn by watching, listening, and doing, Exercise files are the same files the author uses in the course, so you can download them and follow along Premium memberships include access to all exercise files in the library.

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Learn by watching, listening, and doing! Exercise files are the same files the author uses in the course, so you can download them and follow along. Exercise files are available with all Premium memberships.
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